1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a monitoring system and method applied to monitoring cameras, etc., and a program and a recording medium which are used with the system and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Monitoring systems have conventionally been used for monitoring situations in wide areas. For example, monitoring systems have been used for sea surveillance, river surveillance, restricted area monitoring, wild animal behavior observation, etc. Since pictures of a wide area must be captured, a video camera having a very large number of pixels has been used. Accordingly, the system price is expensive, thus causing a problem in cost. Unlike this type of system, a method has been proposed in which, by capturing still images while sequentially shifting capturing ranges of a camera, and connecting the images, an image in a monitored area is generated. In this method, an extremely high-resolution image can be obtained as an entire image. Thus, when a portion of the entire image is obtained as an enlarged image, the enlarged image itself has a high resolution and is clear. Also, in the above monitoring system, not only captured images can be monitored in real time, but also images captured in the past can be monitored, with the captured images stored in a memory. Moreover, by monitoring the images captured in the past, and analyzing each image, the cause of, for example, a particular event, such as an accident or a disaster, can be clarified.
Nevertheless, the monitoring systems of the related art have a poor operability in that it takes a long time to read and display images stored in the memory. This is because the amount of data per image is very large since each image for image analysis must have a high resolution and clearness.
In addition, it is difficult for the above monitoring systems to monitor a moving object such as a wild animal. This is because it is difficult to shorten intervals at which an image displayed on a display is updated since the data capacity of images is very large. In the monitoring system of the related art, not only captured images can be displayed, but also the captured images can be recorded on a recording medium, and can be transferred to a personal computer through a network. However, since the data capacity of the images is very large, it takes a very long time to perform a process for transferring the captured images from the monitoring system to the personal computer through the network. Also, a process for the monitoring system for recording the captured images on the recording medium, and a process for the personal computer for reading images from the recording medium each require a very long time.